The GNU-Darwin Distribution is a free operating system and a popular source of free software for Mac OS X and Darwin-x86 users, but it is also a platform for digital activism. Founded in November of 2000, the Distribution has the stated goal of bringing software freedom to computer users of every stripe, and vigilantly defending digital liberties.

From a lingual point of view (and my argument there was based on lingual principles), it doesn't matter how much the part is used, or wether or not it's the primary interface. A pars pro toto metaphore just means that you refer to thing by only mentioning a part of it. It doesn't matter how important that part is.

Your analogy about police implied that what the end user sees dictates what becomes the "part."

If the name of any component of the system is a candidate for going on to become the name of the entire system, then who gets to decide what the component gets chosen? The users? While that may sound like an interesting idea, to say that users get to name a product built by many parties is a slap in the face at all of the parties, even the lucky one that get's "chosen."

Windows had a ruling body that was solely responsible for it's existence. Microsoft could name it whatever it wanted. In the case of free and open software, there is no ruling body that is responsible for all of the code. Hence, we're going to have different ideas of what the name of our operating system is going to be. The pars pro toto metaphore, while it does make you sound very educated, cannot apply fairly to how our operating system gets named in the case where many entities are responsible for it's existence.

GNU believes that they most certainly deserve to be in the name, since in their mind, they have provided the foundation for a 100% free system (as defined by them). There is some merit to this argument; before GNU came around, no one cared if software was free, and because of their software, we can have computers running nothing but free software.

They're asking everyone that appreciates the freedoms that their software provides to call systems built from their software "GNU." They are also asking that people respect the tremendous efforts of those who develop the Linux kernel, and add "Linux" in the name.

And the comparison with the old style BSD license is valid IMO. What will happen if everyone starts saying GNU/Linux? The KDE people will be pissed that nobody recognizes their huge amounts of work. So we have KDE/GNU/Linux. Then we have the Gnome project, and the X11 project.

Read what I've written, please. GNU wants credit because they're the real reason we can have free operating systems, not because free operating systems often use their software.

This is exactly as with the old style BSD license, where they started with a forced single printed message about how much work UC Berkely did, and ended up with 75 of such obnoxious messages. I think I will find it even more obnoxious to say Gnome/KDE/X11/Apache/PHP/MySQL/GNU/Linux Suse Professional 9.0.

Again, that is just not the case. I want you to really listen to me here, so I'm going to write it in italics:

GNU doesn't want to be in the name because they feel like they've done tho most work (though I extrapolated that from your faulty analogy because you implied it). GNU wants credit because RMS and the rest of them created free software, and without them, a 100% free operating system would not be possible.

Re: Jeremiah

To the fellow that believed that the Intel and IBM compilers could build the Linux kernel, you're absolutely wrong. Even if you did manage to build a system without any GNU software, RMS wouldn't ask you to call it GNU/Anything. Furthermore, while the name BSD is older than GNU, all of the BSD's use GNU software heavily.